Yom HaShoah - May 1st 2008

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Tonight we light candles and chant the mourner's prayer to remember our relatives and the other six million who were murdered in the Holocaust. I hope my children and grand children, whose ties to Holocaust survivors are much more tenuous than mine, will also light candles every year and keep the historical facts straight among non-Jews in the generations to come.

StopWatch-8 - Cool Stopwatch for my Phone

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Windows Mobile 6.1 apparently does not ship with a standard stopwatch with the base OS release so I downloaded the first one I found, which happens to be really cool. It is actually 8 different stop watches on one screen. Each lane of the track gets a separate area of the screen and each one can be separately started, stopped, lap-time frozen, etc. Or you can start them all at the same time (the usual race timing) and stop them separately by pushing the button on the phone of the lane number. The application is actually small, elegant C# code that uses the compact .NET framework.

Eitana and Pappa fly a kite at International School

 

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We had enough wind on Sunday to take the kite up again at the International school.  Eitana demonstrated her kite flying prowess again with some excellent technique to keep the kite aloft when the breeze died down.  We found some wind on the hill between the soccer fields and were able to fly the kite over the hill to catch that breeze.  And of course Maddie had a great time exploring the area and playing with a doggie from one of the girls on a soccer team that was practicing there.

 

Mitch teaches in Raleigh, NC part-1: Monday 4/21/08

The shared van ride service was late picking me up because one of the other people with whom I shared the van was a “no show” and they could not track him down for 15 minutes. It gave me more time to linger over coffee with the family at home. My 4-year-old was up early and is confused about Passover and our dietary restrictions.

I wanted to photograph the TSA security people at the airport searching the 85-year-old woman but I don’t think they would have appreciated that.

There was no matzo for sale at the airport. The pilot flew around Mt Rainier, commenting on it as the plane banked and dropped below the clouds for the view. He did the same thing over Aspen, Colorado. It was odd being in a commercial flight while the pilot played tour-guide and banked the plane to show the views. We arrived late at Dallas and I literally walked off the plane, straight to the gate of the other plane, and then walked on the other plane. There was no slack time for the connection. There were no matzo options for lunch so I ate the inside of a sandwich. It’s like a no-carbs diet.

I watched “Sweeney Todd” in the plane on my phone. If the battery on the laptop would last longer than 45 minutes I think the experience would have been better (screen on phone is a bit too small).

I arrived at the Hilton late, starved, and knackered. There is some sort of a convention or product fair for “tablet computing in hospitals” or something going on in the lobby and along the entire first floor. The restaurant had great side dishes that made up my huge dinner (baked potato, broccoli, salad, vegetarian chili). The room is a huge suite with two showers, a big living room, an office area, dining area, and master bedroom. I showered and crashed early without getting through email. Both of my June forum sessions have updated decks, presentation content, and need policy decisions made. Luckily the speakers are signed up and committed.

Time Trials in the Snow

The Cascade Striders had a mini-track meet for the athletes on Saturday to get them used to running in a meet. I ran the shot put pit. I told the coaches and parents that my pit was "open" and the athletes could participate at any time. I had to teach them all how to put shot and I am not very good. The track events were plagued with snow, wind, and hail. The track had puddles in it. The kids froze. Yofiel had a great time and put some amazing times in. His mile time was top three in his age category. The parents and coaches did a great job running the events on time.

Snow on Passover

It snowed and hailed on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday during the time trials we ran for the cascade striders. It's odd having cold, snow winter weather in the spring. When the sun peaked through during rare breaks from the cold, windy hail, it was quite warm and the ground misted over with the evaperating snow.

Elisheva was home for a short weekend and was very helpful around the house, getting rid of all of our Hametz and preparing the house for the Seder. She explained the historical context and surrounding events of many of the rituals both pre-rabbinic and rabbinical. Ritual hand washing for example predates Judaism. Adinah invited three friends to our Seder, Laura, Catherine and Jesse. It seemed they enjoyed it despite their discomfort with Hebrew. Eitana did not like sitting around at a crowded table and delayed the Seder with some destruction and screaming.

The Seder itself flowed smoothly; wine lubricated the songs and delays. The meal, as usual was fantastic. Gab makes a killer potato salad. The kids could not find the Afikomen that Simeon hid inside a book in an obscure shelf downstairs. They searched for an hour. Even "hot / cold" did not help at the end and he had to tell them that it was inside a book behind which they had already searched. I want Simeon on my side of a spy conflict.

The Strawberry dessert was also fantastic and even the clean-up was not as onerous as we anticipated. It was a great Seder in a great year.

Trail Running with the Cascade Striders

Yesterday (Saturday) a couple of the parents of kids in the Cascade Striders running club / track team went on a trail run to celebrate the sunshine. First we did the standard (killer) dynamics with the kids for 30 minutes, then we took off along the greenbelt trails in Bellevue. We circled Phantom Lake (the hills were very steep) and then we went back to Sammamish High School. The mash-up maps claim we went about 6.25 miles but with all the elevation change it felt more like 7. It was a nice, bright sunshiny day and we pushed the pace.

There are lots of trails that follow the roads or run through the parks / farms and it is even possible to get down to the lakes.

We live in a great neighborhood for hiking / trail running. I wish the weather were always as nice as it was on Saturday.

Best Media Player for Windows Mobile

I finally found a media player that does what I want. It plays divx movies as well as the .avi, .mpg, .mp4, and other formats. The standard player (Windows Media Player) that comes with windows mobile did not work well on my older slower phone. I have to transcode the videos and even then it would often just freeze and not play the videos. I use DrDivx to transcode DVDs to .divx format. A 2-hour movie typically uses under 150 MB of space on the 2 GB card I now have in the phone. I shall be traveling again this month so I loaded some "guy" movies that the family does not want to see into the phone ("Sweeny Todd" and the latest "Rambo"). I plan to watch them in the airport lounges and on the plane. There is still a free version of this player -- TCPMP available for download.

Parker visits the Wyles

A co-worker who volunteers with a wonderful puppy training agency went to Hawaii to compete in the "lava man" triathalon. While she was gone and for a short time before / after her trip we took care of her golden retriever puppy named Parker.

Parker is a wonderful doggie.

He is very positive, happy, empathic, fun-loving, and playful.
Our Labrador retriever Maddie loves to play with Parker and they are both happy and tired after frolicking in the back yard.

Parker loves to play with Eitana. He chews on everything but his favorite chew toys are paper and jigsaw puzzle pieces. He was here for 10 days and will be leaving today. Everyone, especially Maddie will miss him when he goes home.

best ebook reader on windows mobile

I finally found a great etext reader for the books I read in my phone -- allreader v1.31. It has 16 bookmarks, automatically bookmarks your spot between reboots, auto-scrolling at an adjustable pace, great font support, screen rotation, etc. It reads all text formats including .lit, .pdb, .pdf, .txt, .htm, etc.

It is apparantly developed in Russian and the documentation is scarce; however it is a great program. It has no installer; you just drop the gh.exe on to the phone and you're good to go.

Now I need a decent movie viewer; windows media player won't play feature length videos, so I have retreated to the mobile divx player until I find a decent video player for my phone.

Sunday Kite flying

After repairing the oven, Gab was on a roll so she spent the day repairing the shower. She tore out the shoddy caulking, and some of the leaky cover-up from the leaky tile job. Then she patched, cemented, and re-sealed the tile, re-caulked the shower, and opened the tile drains. During this time the rest of the family was on our own for puppy doggie-sitting Parker, baby-sitting Eitana, Sunday school, cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking Maddie swimming, and shopping.

Eitana noticed that it was windy outside, so we went to fly her kite. She navigated it perfectly around the street lamps and trees and had it riding the breeze. She has natural talent at kite flying! I went to tie the kite off on the cyclone fence but I let go of the string and it flew away. It eventually snagged in a tree across the street from Woodridge Elementary school. Eitana was very upset. She did not want to leave the kite stuck in a tree. She got most of the way up the trunk of the tree where the kite snagged; then I convinced her to climb down.

We went home, ate lunch, gathered Yofiel and some of the teenagers (only Laura, Adinah, and Apple came), and set out to retrieve the kite. Eitana and I drove in the car so we were the first to arrive. I attached a string to a stone and eventually snared the spool and string that was stuck in the tree so I pulled it down. Pulling on the string elevated the kite from the neighbor’s yard up into the tree. Yofi and Laura were next to arrive (they jogged). They each tried without success to climb up the tree. Last to arrive were Apple and Adinah; they had, apparently strolled leisurely to the school. Apple went up the tree faster than he had walked to the school. He was 15 meters up when the owner of the house next door, who had not returned the kite after it landed in his yard, came out yelling that Apple had to come down immediately because if Apple fell, his corpse would land in this evil person’s yard. He was waving a pair of hedge sheers and looked very nasty. Apple eventually came down the tree. He said later that he was only 5 meters from the kite. Yofi and the teenagers stayed to play at the elementary school while Eitana and I drove to Home Depot to buy more quarter inch dowel rods -- two for a dollar -- to build another kite.

Gabriella took a break from grouting, sealing, caulking, cementing, ate, and helped us assemble another kite. We used two dowels, the rescued string, and a transparent garbage bag; it was much lighter than the one caught in the tree. It had superior flight characteristics as well.

While the teenagers finished the lunch dishes, we went to the International school (a

bigger field) to fly the new kite. Gab painted a face on the transparent body. It flew quite well in the mild breeze and Eitana did a great job keeping it aloft.

It flew mich higher, faster, and more stably than the kite made of newspapers. It had a higher angle of attack. Eitana was able to keep it aloft with much milder wind.

Eventually we headed home; Gab fried up a vegetable massala with Tofu that was spicy but fantastic. We had it on rice. Even the teenagers enjoyed it. They were so thankful cleaned up the dinner dishes, then headed out for some depressive time at another friend's house. They are having a great spring break so far but I worry that they don't have goals. Simeon spent a few hours outlining his goals for the rest of the vacation. He avoided everyone, eating asynchronously with the family.